While learning new motor skills, we often rely on feedback from a trainer. Auditive feedback and demonstrations are used most frequently, but in many domains they are inappropriate or impractical. We introduce tactile instructions as an alternative to assist in correcting wrong posture during physical activities, and present a set of full-body vibrotactile patterns. An initial study informed the design of our tactile patterns, and determined appropriate locations for feedback on the body. A second experiment showed that users perceived and correctly classified our tactile instruction patterns in a relaxed setting and during a cognitively and physically demanding task. In a final experiment, snowboarders on the slope compared their perception of tactile instructions with audio instructions under real-world conditions. Tactile instructions achieved overall high recognition accuracy similar to audio instructions. Moreover, participants responded quicker to instructions delivered over the tactile channel than to instructions presented over the audio channel. Our findings suggest that these full-body tactile feedback patterns can replace audio instructions during physical activities.

Tactile motion instructions are vibrotactile feedback patterns delivered across the entire body that indicate how to move during physical activities. This work investigates the perception and identification of such patterns, based on two different metaphors, under stationary and active situations. We further combine and sequentially trigger different patterns to explore whether tactile motion instructions are understandable as a simple language. A tactile language could represent motion sequences to guide students during demanding exercises. Finally, the presented studies provide insights into perception and interpretation of tactile feedback and help to inform a design space for full-body vibrotactile cues.